Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

Along with millions of others, I’ve been a diehard fan of Google Reader for the past several years. Whenever I find a blog I want to follow, I simply add the RSS feed to Google Reader, so that I can keep up to date with posts, whether on my desktop or mobile device.

As you can imagine, when I heard the news of the demise of Google Reader, I was not a happy camper! This, after I was already annoyed that they’re killing iGoogle, which has been my start page forever.

Anyway, what can you do? I’ve been trying out other readers, and they’re okay, but not fabulous. Part of the problem is that in Google Reader I starred a bunch of posts so I can easily find them again, and when I import my RSS feeds into other readers, I lose those starred posts.

With Feedly, I can log in with my Google Reader credentials, so it can grab all my RSS feeds AND it adds my starred posts to the Saved For Later group. And when Google Reader finally goes away, all the data will be pulled onto a Feedly server.

The icing on the cake, is that just as I was starting to get comfortable with Feedly, I (and other Google Reader outcasts) received a lovely welcome message from Edwin, CEO of Feedly, including a link to show us how to optimize Feedly to make it look similar to Google Reader. Now that is service!

Now if only I could find a replacement for iGoogle. I’ve tried UStart, Netvibes, igHome… Any suggestions? Leave a comment below!

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Or have posts delivered via email. Thanks for visiting!

Feeling overwhelmed? To Do lists out of control? Want to be get organized? Try Trello!

When I stumbled across Trello, I knew right away it was the tool for me. It’s much more visual than most To Do list applications, and it makes sharing and collaborating on tasks easy.

When you visit the Trello website and sign up for a free account, the first thing you’ll see is the Welcome Board, with some simple tips to help you get started. Take a quick look and you’ll see what I mean by simple. It’s intuitive and doesn’t require learning a complicated productivity system.

Boards are much like the corkboard you have on your wall, but they’re online. You can pin cards to the board in columns, called lists, and then the fun really begins. You can add colored labels to your cards so that you can sort or filter them, give cards a due date, attach other files and checklists to them, and, if you’ve shared the board, you can assign them to other board members. It’s also easy to search for a card by keyword, filter cards by labels, or choose to display cards for one or more board members.

You can create as many Trello boards as you like, but I decided to create a single board for all my work projects, so that I could see at a glance all the projects I’ve committed to. I use the colored labels for clients, which lets me view just the tasks I need to do for a single client if that’s what I need to see.

Trello comes with three lists built in – To Do, Doing, and Done – but you can customize these by adding or removing lists, or renaming them. This gives you the freedom to use whichever productivity system you like. For now, I’m happy with the existing lists, although I add a date to the title of my Done list, and archive the list each week so that things don’t get too cluttered. Archiving hides the list, but it’s still there if I want to reopen it later.

As each new project arrives, I add a card to the bottom of the To Do list. Each morning, I look at my tasks and reorder them based on their priority. Reordering is as simple as dragging and dropping cards up and down the list. Once I’ve decided on the priority, I choose which card I’m going to work on next. I drag that card to my Doing list, and that’s the task I concentrate on. When I’ve completed a card, I drag it into the Done list and give myself a pat on the back. By the end of the week my Done list contains all the things I’ve accomplished.

What else do I like about Trello? It works on my iPad, which is handy in the weekend when we’re working on projects around the house, and there’s an app for the iPhone/iPod Touch, so you can take your Trello boards with you.

Using Trello, I can:

Prioritize my tasks.

See the big picture of everything that needs to be done.

Choose to work on a single task at a time, which frees me from worrying about all the other things on my To Do list.

See a growing list of tasks I’ve completed, which is surprisingly satisfying.

What about you? Have you tried Trello? Or do you prefer another tool for keeping organized?

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Or have posts delivered via email. Thanks for visiting!